field report

"My name is Chandan Yashraj and I am studying public health, international studies, and emergency management at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. I am going into my senior year of university.
I had the privilege to come to Odisha this year to spend 2 weeks, from July 14 – 27, with the villagers of Guptapada, a beautiful village located about half an hour from the city of Bhubaneshwar. I had always heard about the amazing work that AMMACHI Labs does throughout India, but ...

UPDATE! August 2016
"TRUST that all that unfolds is an opportunity." After a legal awareness camp in Guptakashi, empowered women like our facilitator Anjana, started filing RTI (Right to Information act) applications. This form releases vital information and life saving documents such as the BPL (Below Poverty Line) Card that gives people access to food. Most of the villagers live under the poverty line, which means they survive on less than $1.90 USD per day. Anjana, was unable to ac...

Written by Amar Rayne
In a social behaviour experiment to see if we could encourage the shift from open defecation towards toilet usage, myself and two international students coming through the Live-In-Labs program, namely Ana Carolina Rocha from Brazil and Aleix Carreras from Spain, set forth to Ratanpur village in the state of Bihar, where AMMACHI Labs had just completed the construction of two sets of communal toilets.
One set of communal toilets consisted of two toilets side by sid...

Sarah Tedford is an energy medicine practitioner from the Boston area with a background in human services, customer service and UA user testing. Sarah and her colleagues, Martin an instrumentation and robotics software engineer, and Janice, a math teacher, came to Amritapuri never having met Amma before, only hearing of her visits to Boston MA. Curious about the humanitarian work of Amma and the research of Amrita University, the trio stayed in the ashram—their first time in India—and had the o...

I know the value of AMMACHI Labs’ work; at least I tend to think I do. I know the importance of self-sustainability, of self-empowerment, and of comprehensive skill training. When speaking with women who have taken part in the Labs’ toilet building training, I can see the value they place on their new toilets and their new skills. All this, however, was recently underscored and reaffirmed in my imagination after spending just one day with AYUDH members and Amrita Vidyalayam students from Mangalo...

Ransai Village, Maharashtra
Feb 11-16
From Ahmedabad, we made our way to Mumbai on an early train, reaching the Navi Mumbai ashram in time for tea. The local devotee who has been working the most with the Ransai Village people met us in the evening, after haven taken a group of nearly 100 to the local bank earlier to set up accounts for everyone. Over 85% of the people there did not have a bank account and were being left out of a number of government services because of it. At the same
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